I see this on a lot of booru style sites but can't figure it out. When you sort by score (order:score) and rank (order:rank), what is the functional difference? I know there is a score per submission, but what is rank?

Score is simply direct votes, positive minus negative votes. Rank is a more complicated formula, using score and penalizing older posts to keep the front of order:rank largely newer posts.

The formula is rank = log3(score) + (time)/35000 where time is measured in seconds (when it's measuring from doesn't matter (exercise: show why this is true))
Highest rank is shown first, second highest is second, and so on.

is the exact formula
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/d69c34ee9a20bb5175fa66b58f0b0d734554b3b4/app/logical/elastic_post_query_builder.rb#L291

Kira has amazingly said that this isn't as complicated as she wanted

scth said:
Score is simply direct votes, positive minus negative votes. Rank is a more complicated formula, using score and penalizing older posts to keep the front of order:rank largely newer posts.

I never knew about that, seems useful

Does it only work on the homepage? I tried to order:rank my own posts out of curiosity, but the search came up empty.

Also seems a bit weird that it doesn't take favorites into account. But I guess different people give favorites different levels of importance compared to scores; some consider favs more important, some consider score more important, some consider them equal, etc.

lendrimujina said:
Does it only work on the homepage? I tried to order:rank my own posts out of curiosity, but the search came up empty.

Also seems a bit weird that it doesn't take favorites into account. But I guess different people give favorites different levels of importance compared to scores; some consider favs more important, some consider score more important, some consider them equal, etc.

It only takes into account the top ≈4000 ranked posts it seems

snpthecat said:
It only takes into account the top ≈4000 ranked posts it seems

It's the last two days, not any number